The Real Issue Is the Peace of Westphalia

The following remarks by Lyndon LaRouche on Kosovo's Feb. 17 declaration of independence, made in reply to an e-mail question, have urgent, global relevance.

Since the Roman Emperor divided the Roman Empire, putting the Slavs who had migrated southwards into the Balkans between those of them dwelling on the opposite bank of a common river, Croat versus Serb, the region now called "the Balkans" has retained that perpetually simmering condition of fraternal homicide which that region has inherited, to the present day. What began as the imperial management of the Balkans, through methods of crazy-quilt forms of religious warfare by the Byzantine emperors, has been adopted as a method of statecraft by the respective great oligarchical empires of west Asia and continental Europe, and their successors, up to the present instant.

Since the time of that imperial division of the crisis-stricken Roman Empire, many wars have been fought under the flags of religious sects: that by credulous neighbors, neighbors who kill one another for the spectators' amusement and profiting of the imperial powers which use the Balkans as a gladiatorial chessboard of fraternal homicide. This was the trick used by imperial London to impel a foolish Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and an even more foolish Czar Nicholas II of Russia, at one another's throats, not only for the sake of a senile Habsburg Kaiser, but the intended imperial profit of the British imperial uncle (Edward VII) of both German Kaiser and Russian Czar.

So, once again, in the aftermath of the 1989-1990 crisis of the Soviet and Comecon systems, the British Empire rose to the occasion, to ignite what became a new wave of Balkan fratricide among both the former members and neighbors of Tito's Yugoslavia. So, at this instant, imperial London has unleashed a fresh, intended slaughter over the destiny of Kosovo; so, the fools of the Balkans are prepared to hurl themselves afresh onto the same sacrificial altar, once again, as a century earlier, as a fresh wave of Balkan war.

You must not avoid the reality that religious warfare was the imperial method deployed by the Byzantine Empire into Bulgaria and other parts of the Balkans, and that the Ottoman Empire inherited a franchise for the same practice....

You must not forget, that it was London which used Venice's Volpi di Misurata in the same operation involving London's Fabian Society agent Alexander Helphand (foolishly considered a German agent by credulous Russians and Ukrainians, still today), as part of what was known as the London- and Paris-steered "Young Turk" operation, the operation which was the pilot form of what became the Franco-British Sykes-Picot treaty-network which controls much of the destiny of west Asia still today.

You must not overlook the pattern defined by three London-steered operations of the 1989-2008 interval to date: 1) the Thatcher-Mitterrand Maastricht Treaty against Germany and all Eastern Europe; 2) the originally intended modality underlying the present successors of Thatcher's Maastricht, the Tony Blair-prompted, London-crafted Lisbon I globalization scheme, and its successor, the proposed Lisbon II treaty dictatorship over all of western and central continental Europe. The current Kosovo operation is entirely a British imperial operation, which employs nominally U.S. assets Richard Holbrooke and the legacy of Holbrooke's former boss, a British agent (of the H.G. Wells Society) and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whose father was the Ph.D. advisor of current U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

You must think: How is it that people associated with the Balkans region are induced, again and again, to slaughter their closest neighbors (and also themselves) for the amusement and advantage of empires such as the Byzantine, Ottoman, and British imperiums? Why have the people of the Balkan region failed, again, and again, and again, to recognize the heritage of that 1648 Peace of Westphalia which ended the great religious warfare of the 1492-1648 interval, the Peace of Westphalia which London's singularly un-Christian Tony Blair did the most he could to destroy? Some peoples of the Balkans have learned this lesson from history. Why not the Kosovars, in particular? Why should the people of Kosovo destroy themselves in such a madly foolish way? Of course, those supporting the Kosovo push have their various, imagined reasons; but what advantage is there in jumping into the fires of extinction for the geopolitical amusement of London?